Republicans are backing away from a Bush administration plan to sell off public lands in the West. Democrats never liked the idea, nor did most citizens. The U.S. Forest Service said it has received about 150,000 comments, virtually all of them opposed, in response to its proposal to sell public lands.

The scheme was well hidden deep within the president”s proposed federal budget released in early February. Newspapers in the West started asking about and writing about the proposal, and the firestorm begin.

Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, told the Denver Post in the beginning that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would consider selling only “small, isolated tract that are difficult to manage.”

A week later, the Forest Service released its list of some of the potential sites that could be for sale. That”s when we became even more alarmed. The list includes Sawmill Peak, the fire lookout on the upper ridge. It also includes most of the Lassen National Forest lands between the Paradise ridge and the North Fork Feather River, including a couple of parcels fronting on Paradise Lake.

The list includes most of the scattered national forest lands around Butte Meadows, and those in the vicinity of the Big Bend of the North Fork. A few parcels on the Cohasset ridge are included as well.

All told, as much as 309,000 acres of national forest could be sold under the proposal, including 85,465 acres in California, far more than any other state. More than 41 percent of the sales in California would come from our two local forests, Plumas and Lassen.

The administration, led by Rey, tried to paint the land sales as a wonderful idea. Thank goodness, most of Congress listened instead to citizens.

A Republican senator from Montana called the plan “dead on arrival.” The Denver Post says the plan has since been “disowned by Republicans in Congress” and “pushed into the shadows.”

The proposal remains alive only because it hasn”t come to a vote yet. And it probably won”t.